THE SHIP OF MONSTERS. Sotomayor, Mexico, 1960. Originally released as La nave de los monstruos. Eulalio Gonzalez, Ana Bertha Lepe, Lorena Velazquez. Written by Jose Maria Fernandez Unsain and Alfreda Verla Jr. Directed by Rugelio A. Gonzalez.

   I spend October reading scary books and watching old monster movies, and last month had its share of highs and lows: THE BODY SNATCHER, INVISIBLE GHOST, WHITE ZOMBIE, GODZILLA, BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS and others too humorous to mention. Some were brilliant, some abysmal, but nothing else this year was quite like SHIP OF MONSTERS.

   In fact, I don’t think there’s been a movie like this since THE PHANTOM EMPIRE (1935) a Musical-Comedy-Western-Sci-Fi serial of bizarre proportions. SHIP goes it one or two better, with Monsters and Babes, and being a feature film, it has the advantage of brevity (the soul of wit) over the Gene Autry chapter play.

   The story here has something to do with the planet Venus, populated by beautiful women ever since all the men killed each other in senseless wars. Nothing daunted, but perhaps a bit short-sighted, the Queen of Venus sends agents Gamma and Beta (the improbably-cantilevered Lepe and Velazquez) around the Galaxy to round up more males.

   Turns out the Venusian Vixens haven’t been able to find any guys, but to their credit (or in order to meet a quota) they have rounded up a goodly assortment of male monsters, kept in check by an imposing robot named Thor. With this entourage they land on Earth and meet Mexican Singing Cowboy Eulalio Gonzalez, proprietor of a one-cow ranch, who seems to split his time between singing in the saddle and Munchausening at the local cantina — which leads to predictable complications later on when he tries to warn everyone about the Monsters, but I’m getting ahead of the story.

   Gonzalez’s singing may be a matter of personal taste, but what he lacks in euphony he makes up for in persistence. He sings on every possible occasion and sometimes for no reason at all. He falls in love and he sings. He rides into town and he sings. He fights monsters and he sings. No one believes his warnings, and… you guessed it. He even does a duet with a vampiress trying to suck his blood.

   Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you about the Vampiress. Turns out someone in Venusian HR screwed up and one of the space-gals (Velazquez, fondly remembered from DOCTOR OF DOOM [reviewed here ] is a vampire who decides to commandeer Thor the Robot (remember him?), free the monsters, conquer the Earth and gosh-knows what all.

   And oh yes: it’s up to Gonzalez to beat up the monsters, thwart her evil plans and romance the other Venus-Babe.

   This is Silliness on an epic scale, and everyone gives it its props. There’s a nifty set for the interior of the space ship, gruesome monster makeup, a flashy robot (who reappeared in one of the AZTEC MUMMY movies) and a plot that seems made up as it goes along, just like the games us kids used to play.

   In all, a film to sit back and enjoy, if you can switch off the brain for a bit. As for Gonzalez’s singing – is it too late to give the Nobel Prize to the guy who invented Fast-Forward?

RANDY RUSSELL – Hot Wire. “Rooster” Franklin #1. Bantam, paperback original; 1st printing, May 1989.

   “Rooster” Franklin is basically what you call a car thief. His home base is Kansas City, on both sides of the border. The first 60 pages pf Hot Wire, his first adventure worth recording, are very slow going — Rooster, who tells his own story, is not anywhere near as streetwise as he thinks he is, and his life, frankly, isn’t very interesting. I almost bailed before any action started.

   But at the 60 page mark, or thereabouts, the story finally kicks into high gear. And what the story is is a heist novel. A bank robbery. The Big One. A huge step up for a former-to-be car thief. But as in all fiction — whether novels or movies — heists, no matter how well planned, seldom go well.

   Not only does a take of an estimated $400,000 go missing. but three deaths occur as a direct result, two of them innocent and one of these Rooster’s best friend. Revenge is what he wants, and revenge is what he gets.

   This may sound like a good basis for one heck of a heist story, but it isn’t. The last two killings are at Rooster’s own hand, and believe me, there is no finesse involved in either of them. Rooster’s mindset is on revenge (and the money) but does it occur to him that everything that happened after the robbery went bad is on his own shoulders? In a word, no.

   There were four more books in the series, but even if (as I suspect) Rooster’s further adventures into crime solving were an ex-car thief, I’m going to say that no, they’re not for me.

   Anyone remember John Roeburt? My hunch is that few do even if they’re regular readers of this column. I believe he first swam into my ken in the late 1950s, when I was a teen and he was story editor and occasional scriptwriter for NBC-TV’s THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF ELLERY QUEEN (1958-59), starring George Nader and later Lee Philips.

   Being heavily into EQ at that time, I made it a point to check out this Roeburt guy and found several of his novels at my friendly neighborhood used book store. Prices were unbelievable back then: you could buy a hardcover for a quarter, a paperback for a dime. I picked up all the Roeburt I could find but, and weirdo that I am, read few if any of his books. Recently I decided he might be a good subject for a column and pulled down a few of his early novels from my shelves. Was I right? You tell me.

   A New Yorker from square one, Roeburt was born on March 15, 1909. At least one website claims that, like myself, he graduated from NYU Law School, probably during the pit of the Depression, but neither the Law School Alumni Office nor the Registrar’s Office has been able to confirm this.

   If he was an attorney, we don’t know whether he ever practiced law. Most of his career as a writer he spent in radio and later TV but he did turn out a book every few years. Outside the crime genre he’s best known for EARTHQUAKE (1959), a mainstream novel nominally written by TV comic Milton Berle and himself.

   This book had nothing in common with the 1974 Big Disaster movie of the same name, co-scripted by Mario Puzo and starring Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, George Kennedy and Lorne Greene, with special effects out the wazoo. Titles aren’t copyrightable but theoretically Berle and Roeburt could have sued on a claim of unfair competition.

   However, to succeed on that basis you have to establish that your title has developed a secondary meaning, i.e. it’s identified with you in the public mind the way, say, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD is identified with Harper Lee. In any event there was no such suit and Roeburt wasn’t around to bring it. He had died of a heart attack on May 22, 1972 at his summer home on Fire Island.

   His first novel, JIGGER MORAN (Greenberg, 1944), which I picked up for a cool quarter back in my teens, is hard to classify. On the surface it’s a Mean Streets thriller in the Raymond Chandler tradition (although without first-person narration), but every so often it tries futilely to break out of its hardboiled mold and enter the mainstream, abandoning its protagonist for a few pages now and then, even offering a flashback to the childhood of one of the other principals.

   Jigger, whom one can easily imagine being played on the big screen by Bogart, is nominally a cab driver but actually an amoral “fixer” with both a Ph.D. and a law school diploma, which Roeburt insists on calling a degree De Juris. (This is both bad Latin and dead wrong: in Roeburt’s time what you got when you graduated from a law school was called an Ll.B., for Bachelor of Laws, although by my own graduation year, 1967, the name had been changed to J.D., for Juris Doctor. In any event, the second Moran novel tells us that he’s been disbarred for years.)

   Numbers racket kingpin Little Joey, whom one can easily imagine being played by Edward G. Robinson, hires Moran to clear him of the murder of a German-American doctor who apparently won a huge amount of money from Joey’s organization not long before he was found battered almost beyond recognition in his Yorkville home office. The trail leads Jigger to the usual zoo of lowlifes — including a psychotic whose wife died after a botched abortion at the doctor’s hands and several pseudo-intellectual leftists from Greenwich Village — and ultimately to a Nazi propaganda mill.

   What makes JIGGER MORAN stand out from the usual tough-guy thriller is that it’s studded with lines of the sort Bill Pronzini in an inspired phrase has called “alternative flapdoodle.” I’ll quote just a few, complete with page references so no one will think I’m making this stuff up:

    Jigger gave the cherchez la femme faucet a quarter-inch twist….(35)

    Jigger thrust a nail-file through a crack in Wang’s double-decker subtleties as a reminder that the good doctor had two strikes on him and Jigger was pitcher and umpire both. (129)

    Jigger pummeled his way through the mob cacaphonizing at Johnny’s bar…. (133)

    “Used to be a ranking sluggerdutch from Chicago.” (139)

    The office girl squared her breasts as Jigger zipped past…. (201)

    [H]e looked like a man jumping out of his skin. (208)

   Roeburt uses a number of throwaway references to evoke the 1944 atmosphere but they don’t always work. The Euro-café filled with “Viennese refugees who took fright with the bullet that reduced Dolfuss to a footnote in history” (209) is okay if the reader remembers that Engelbert Dollfuss (with two l’s), chancellor of Austria, had been shot by the Nazis in 1934.

   But what about Jigger’s prediction that he and a certain cop “will be principals in a rewrite of the Becker-Rosenthal case” (189)? Personally I don’t feel like going online to track down that ancient case, and I suspect very few readers would have wanted to do it back in that cenozoic era before the Web.

   Roeburt does even worse when he ventures onto religious turf. The well-known Catholic apologist and 1950s TV personality Fulton Sheen morphs in his hands into “Monsignor Sheean” (209), but that’s a mere bag of shells beside the unforgettable reference to “the St. James version of the Old Testament” on the same page!

   JIGGER MORAN was reprinted twice after its hardcover appearance: as THE CASE OF THE TEARLESS WIDOW (HandiBooks pb #46, 1946) and as WINE, WOMEN AND MURDER (Avon pb #807, 1958). I don’t have either of these editions and don’t know whether Roeburt cleaned up any of the wacko lines from the original but, as we’ll see shortly, there’s reason to believe he might have.

   One notices a certain cousinly resemblance between the beginning of JIGGER MORAN and that of Roeburt’s follow-up novel, THERE ARE DEAD MEN IN MANHATTAN (Mystery House, 1946). Jigger is pulled out of a crap game in a nightclub kitchen by Dixie Travers, a gangster driven out of New York and now holed up across the Hudson in Jersey City, and offered a large fee if he’ll clear up a murder.

   This time, however, the gangster himself is not under suspicion. The guy in the shadow of the hot seat is Blaine Fowler, who’s on trial for the murder of his mistress and almost certain to be convicted. Why does Travers care? Because, he says, Fowler owes him $50,000 in gambling debts and can’t pay up if he fries.

   Soon after Jigger takes the case, one of the Fowler jurors is (non-fatally) poisoned, a mistrial is declared and Fowler is released on bail. (Yeah, right.) Next someone tries to shoot the poisoned juror in his hospital bed, and Jigger finds himself in the thick of a conspiracy involving, among other notables, the DA who put Fowler on trial. Not only is our hero beaten to a pulp, which is par for the course in vintage PI novels, but he also gets scalped, which I think makes him unique in the tough-guy genre.

   In his review for the San Francisco Chronicle (March 17, 1946) Tony Boucher called the book “a highly individual and effective variant on the hardboiled school” despite its employment of “one of the oldest cliché solutions….” No, the murderer is not a woman Jigger has had sex with. Through the pages of this caper he remains chaste. Who’d want sex with a scalped man anyway?

   Various plot components make it clear that Raymond Chandler and especially FAREWELL, MY LOVELY (1940) were very much on Roeburt’s mind at the time: witness the Moose Malloy-like hulk who administers the scalping to Jigger, and the phony sanitarium in the later chapters. The weirdo lines that marked JIGGER MORAN are fewer in number this time around but just as flapdoodlesque:

    “Christy… doormanned lugubriously, tallying all incoming customers with a clockometer.” (19) “Fowler can-canned his bottom to the edge of the bunk and his feet touched the floor.” (44) In the abridged paperback edition of DEAD MEN, which I happen to have (Graphic pb #42, 1951), the first of these howlers is cut completely and the second is toned down to the conventional “Fowler sat up in his bunk and swung around.”

   It’s revisions like these that lead me to suspect that if we had one or both of the paperback editions of JIGGER MORAN we’d find similar instances of — if I may perpetrate my own Roeburtism — second-thoughting.

   In the third and final Jigger Moran novel, CORPSE ON THE TOWN (Graphic pb #27, 1950), Roeburt dispenses with weirdo lines except for one or two like “Jigger smiled a shot of Vitamin W” (37). This time around the track we get much more dialogue — which is natural considering that so much of his writing took the form of radio drama — plus the only opening scene in any of the three that can reasonably be called noirish.

   On a rain-soaked evening, Jigger drops off a passenger in front of an apartment building on Greenwich Village’s Charlton Street and is about to turn in his cab and call it a night when a stranger he can barely see asks him to deliver a trunk to the Railway Express office near Penn Station, offering a fee of five bucks, which in 1950 was a princely sum for a short haul.

   On 31st Street he’s cut off by four cops in official cars and forced to accompany them to the police garage, where the trunk is taken off his cab and found to contain the body of a young woman, battered beyond recognition. The trail leads him to a wealthy upstate New York family, a police chief with a murderous streak, a professor of creative writing who was mentoring the dead woman, a red-bearded Greenwich Village artist with a penchant for blackmail and all sorts of other pungent characters.

   Since the book was published as a paperback original it was reviewed nowhere, not even in the New York Times, although if it had appeared a couple of years later Tony Boucher would certainly have covered it in his “Criminals at Large” column, which began in July 1951.

   What Tony would have said we’ll never know. Personally I found the book sort of confusing for a number of reasons, for instance the will that Roeburt summarizes for us in Chapter Nine:

   Wealthy grandmother disinherited her son and left most of her estate to her granddaughter provided she gets married before she turns 21. Would a court have found that provision contrary to public policy and void? One would expect that if Roeburt were a lawyer he’d at least bring up the issue but not a single word is said about it.

   The granddaughter did get married before turning 21 but her husband was also her first cousin. Is that legal? It is in New York today and presumably was back in 1950. But suppose she gets married before age 21 and then dies? We are told that “the old lady didn’t think to insure against such a contingency.”

   Well, duh! You don’t have to be a law school graduate to know that in that event the estate goes wherever the granddaughter’s will says it goes or, if she didn’t leave a will, to her nearest relatives by intestate succession.

   There are other sources of confusion too but it would be boring to harp on them.

   Several years after the novel’s first appearance, a new version was published as CASE OF THE HYPNOTIZED VIRGIN (Avon pb #730, 1956), whose front cover informs us in small print that it was “based on” CORPSE ON THE TOWN. The main difference between the two titles is that in 1956 Roeburt inserted several hundred words of new material about hypnosis and reincarnation, obviously designed to cash in on the then wildly popular book THE SEARCH FOR BRIDEY MURPHY. The additions were no improvements.

   Three Roeburts in one column is quite enough. If I decide to talk about his other books — notably TOUGH COP (1949) and THE HOLLOW MAN (1954), both featuring Johnny Devereaux, and the stand-alone crime novels THE LUNATIC TIME (1956) and THE CLIMATE OF HELL (1958), not to mention his countless scripts for radio and TV — it will have to be on another occasion. Probably not next month. If I may quote the “Send In the Clowns” song, maybe next year.

THE TWO FACES OF DR. JEKYLL. Hammer Films, UK, 1960. Also released in the US as House of Fright and Jekyll’s Inferno. Based on the 1886 novella “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,” by Robert Louis Stevenson. Paul Massie (Dr. Henry Jekyll / Mr. Edward Hyde), Dawn Addams, Christopher Lee, David Kossoff, Norma Marla, Francis De Wolff, Joy Webster. Director: Terence Fisher.

   Hammer’s The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll isn’t a particularly good film, but it’s one I’d nevertheless recommend watching. Not so much for the screenplay or the direction – both competent but no more – but for the production design and the aesthetic, the sets that don’t remotely look like sets, the color scheme, the sense of otherworldliness.

   These, as much as the acting, are what make Hammer Films worth viewing. Somehow, on their somewhat limited budgets, the studio was able to create overtly theatrical horror dramas that unfolded as much in deeply saturated colors as in dialogue.

   This adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella about the duality of man is no exception. If neither Paul Massie, who portrays both Jekyll and Hyde, nor Christopher Lee, who portrays a friend to both men, deliver supremely memorable performances, that isn’t to say that there isn’t other things happening on screen to keep the viewers attention for the duration.

   There are a few scenes set at a London nightclub called The Sphinx that are beautifully executed and lavishly designed. Similarly, there’s a short montage sequence in which Mr. Hyde visits the seedy side of town, making an appearance at a fight club and later at an opium den. But these are unfortunately few and far between in what is basically a rather talky movie that doesn’t do the material justice.

RICHARD SALE “Chiller-Diller.” Daffy Dill #37. Short story. Detective Fiction Weekly, 24 June 1939. Reprinted in The Big Book of Female Detectives, edited by Otto Penzler (Black Lizard, 2018).

    Before he became well known in Hollywood circles as a writer, producer (Gentlemen Marry Brunettes) and director (Abandon Ship, Malaga, and so on), Richard Sale was a prolific writer of pulp fiction, with several hundred stories to his credit, including the long-running “Daffy” Dill series, beginning with “The Fifty Grand Brain” (Detective Fiction Weekly, 03 November 1934) and ending with “Death Flies High” (Flynn’s Detective Fiction, June 1943).

    “Chiller-Diller” is very much typical for the series, as breezy and fast-moving as you might expect a tale about a brash reporter for a New York City newspaper might be. The people in charge of the Chronicle have two stories going on at once: first the murder of a lady “cocktail” reporter for the rival Dispatchl and secondly the elopement of a young debutante with a notorious crooner slash hoodlum named Al Myers.

   Of course the two stories are connected, and it doesn’t take long for Daffy to find out how. The reason the tale is included in Otto Penzler’s The Big Book of Female Detectives is once again on the iffy side. Dinah Mason, the gossip columnist for the Chronicle and the love of Daffy’s life, is the one who found her rival’s body and is the one whose byline is on the story. She’s sent down to Florida for background information after that, however, and thereby essentially disappears from the story.

   The popularity of the canny lawyer in fiction dates at least back to stories told about Abe Lincoln and were popularized by characters like Post’s Randolph Mason, Baroness Orczy’s Skin ‘O My Tooth, and Train’s Mr. Tutt. Post and Orczy both featured lawyers very much in the Mason tradition — Randolph Mason much closer to the edge than Perry ever thought of being.

   But there is no question the Prohibition and then the Depression era saw a sharp rise in outlaw heroes and slick legal types who fought for the little guy by any means possible. The whole spirit of the New Deal era was the idea of the little guy taking on the powers that be whether it be the rich or the state with gentleman adventurers, adventuresses, masked heroes, outlaws and some gangsters, clever defense attorneys, independent minded private eyes, and wise cracking reporters dominating the popular imagination.

   What Gardner did in the Perry Mason novels that was unique was to marry the hard-boiled voice and attitude to the classic detective story and the court-room drama. It may seem formulaic today, but fictional lawyers outside of plays didn’t solve their cases with brilliant courtroom tactics in much of the pre-Mason mystery fiction. It isn’t just Perry Mason who is a brilliant creation, but the entire milieu he operates in.

   Prior to Perry you might get the rare courtroom mystery, but most would amount to perhaps Dr. Thorndyke giving evidence, or Lord Peter speaking before a trial in the House of Lords, Uncle Abner in a short story, or perhaps Mr. Tutt, but there was no one quite like Perry Mason and nothing like those dramatic courtroom solutions Gardner provided. If he didn’t invent the genre, he honed it and perfected it, and gave it a new a vital life on the printed page.

   I always liked Gardner’s Doug Selby DA books, but I have to admit Selby is pretty colorless compared to his nemesis A.B. Carr or Perry. Gardner wisely made Perry part rogue, part detective, part gun fighter, and part crusading knight to the point we never really needed to know much about Perry as a human being, just that he was there to protect the innocent and risk everything doing it.

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Case of the Haunted Husband. William Morrow, hardcover, 1941. Pocket #590, paperback, 1949. Reprinted by Pocket several times. Ballantine, paperback; 1st printing, August 1981. (A later printing from 1985 is shown to the right.)

   Gardner was at his prime when he wrote this one, there’s no doubt about it. His client is a young woman who rather foolishly decided to make her way from San Francisco to Hollywood by means of hitch-hiking, which admittedly was a lot more common as a way of transportation than it is now, but when the man who picks her up in Bakersfield starts making a pass at her, she struggles and an accident happens.

   Someone in another car dies, and when she’s found as the only one in her car, no one believes her story and she’s charged with manslaughter. No one but Perry Mason, that is, and when he learns that the car she was in really belonged to wealthy Hollywood producer, his dislike of unequal justice kicks in immediately.

   Mason also liked his cases to be both challenging and complicated, and believe me, this one is both. It also has some juicy courtroom scenes, which I’m always looking forward to whenever I pick up a Perry Mason novel, and I don’t believe I’m the only one, then or now.

   We also get some time spent with Perry, Della, Paul and even Lt. Tragg at dinner time, the latter still on the other side of the case, but still to able to overcome that and joke around a little. I may be wrong, but I don’t believe this happened in the Mason books all that often. Of course it doesn’t take very long for Tragg to stumble over evidence that implicates Perry, who’s already been skating on thin ice in the case for far too long. More than any other defense attorney ever would.

   I mentioned up above that this is a complicated case. You can double or triple that statement with no trouble at all. I’m not sure I unraveled it entirely, even after reading through Mason’s explanation. It seems to make sense, but I’m not sure. There simply were too many people doing too many unusual things, both before and after the fatal accident.

   The end result is a lot of fun to read, but I thought I’d better warn you about the ending.

CASABLANCA “Siren Song” April 10, 1956. ABC – Warner Brothers. CAST: Charles McGraw as Rick Blaine, Marcel Dalio as Renaud. GUEST CAST: Mari Blanchard as Elsa Norden, James Mitchell as Francisco, Roberta Haynes as Maria, and Hayden Rorke as Henderson. Written by Frederic Brady. Directed by Richard L. Bare. Produced by Jerome Robinson – Executive Producer: William T. Orr. Based on film CASABLANCA (1942) – One of the rotating series under the title WARNER BROTHERS PRESENTS

   Despite its constant efforts to stop such behavior, YouTube is a great source for the TV fan. You never know what TV treasure you will find there. In this case it is a lost episode of the ABC-TV series CASABLANCA (1955-56).

   For those who have seen the TV premiere episode of CASABLANCA (1955-56) “Who Holds Tomorrow” (available on “Two Disc Special Edition” CASABLANCA – the film; DVD), “Siren Song” will show how far the series fell in its attempt to capture the magic of the movie.

   â€œSiren Song” is a complete episode of CASABLANCA, but missing the WARNER PRESENTS opening host segment by Gig Young and the end segment that went behind the scenes to promote a Warner Brothers film.

   The film CASABLANCA (1942) is still considered one of the greatest films ever made. The romantic adventure of two people and their doomed love affair still has meaning today.

   Warner Brothers has made two attempts at adapting the film to TV. I reviewed the NBC 1983 version here.

   The 1955 attempt was one of the rotating series under the title WARNER BROTHERS PRESENTS, along with KING’S ROW, CHEYENNE and a dramatic anthology. CASABLANCA would last only ten episodes of the scheduled thirteen.

   The series aired on Tuesday at 7:30 to 8:30 on ABC. Opposite on CBS was NAME THAT TUNE followed by NAVY LOG, on NBC it was DINAH SHORE then PLYMOUTH NEWS CARAVAN, at 8pm NBC rotated the MILTON BERLE SHOW, MARTHA RAYE SHOW and the CHEVY SHOW. DuMont left the time period to its local affiliates.

   â€œSiren Song” is a good but predictable TV noir complete with a man-hating femme fatale. The series itself had several flaws with the most serious being Charles McGraw in the Bogart role of the tragic romantic hero Rick Blaine.

   Retired matador Francisco yearns to return to the glory of the bullring. He ignores the warnings of his wife and his friend Rick that Francisco is too old to survive the ring.

   Everyone notices the beautiful blonde Elsa enter, a femme fatale who few men can resist. Elsa finds pleasure in destroying men. She discards her current lover and sets her sights on Francisco.

   Francisco falls for her charm, abandoning his loyal loving wife. It does not take much for Elsa to convince Francisco to fight the bull again.

   The film CASABLANCA proved too iconic for this early TV series to live up to, even for the premiere episode “Who Holds Tomorrow” that actually tried.

   Comparing the entrance and interior sets of Rick’s Café Americain in “Who Holds Tomorrow” to “Siren Song” illustrates the series budget cuts and that Warner Brothers had given up on the series.

   Director Richard L. Bare (77 SUNSET STRIP) did well in capturing the noir mood of the predictable script and the filming of the bullfighting scene was impressive for its time, but Casablanca, the city as well as the heart of the film, were missing.

   The series was set in contemporary 1955 Casablanca and portrayed the locale as a center of Cold War intrigue. However in the real world at that time Casablanca was a center of revolution between the Moroccans and the French and Spanish. During the time this series was on the air the French officially granted Morocco its independence.

   The tension between the natives and the French (and Spanish) was ignored in this episode and while politics played no role in “Siren Song,” the turmoil of the time should at least have been part of the background atmosphere.

   Even a greater mistake was the relationship between Rick and Renaud took a step back as if the movie’s ending never happened. Marcel Dalio was no Claude Raines but in a nice piece of trivia, he had played the role of Emil the croupier in the movie version.

   The fatal flaw was Rick. It is no surprise that McGraw failed to match Bogart as the tragic romantic hero. A bigger problem was Rick of the movie was not the Rick of this series. TV Rick seemed content, almost happy with his life. Where was the angst of the movie’s Rick that made the character so romantic?

   This episode as with many of early TV series focused on guest characters more than the main star of the series. But CASABLANCA’s appeal was more about Rick than the premise. The audience was there for Rick, not some story about random characters.

   The guest cast did OK. Mari Blanchard (DESTRY) was at her best, showing the glee she felt as she used a man and cruelly sent him off to his doom. Today’s old TV fans will notice Hayden Rorke from I DREAM OF JEANNIE, playing the man who paid the bills for his time with Elsa. James Mitchell (ALL MY CHILDREN) as Matador Francisco handled the bullfighting scene better than the self-pitying side of the retired bullfighter.

   The major film studios had always looked down on TV as the enemy, but Disney’s financial success of TV series DISNEYLAND the season before and how Disney used it to promote its other product convinced other major studios to give TV a try.

   WARNER BROTHERS PRESENTS was that series for Warner Brothers. While CASABLANCA and KING’S ROW were TV failures and other studios attacked Warner Brothers and ABC for the behind the scenes segment as being a six-minute free commercial for Warner Brothers films (which it was), the huge success of the third series CHEYENNE would keep Warner Brothers happy with the profits from the TV business.

   Without more episodes its remains difficult to judge this attempt to bring CASABLANCA to the small screen, “Siren Song” was a better than average TV noir drama for the early days of television. But anyone expecting to find the romance adventure worthy of the name CASABLANCA will be disappointed.

EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS – The Monster Men. Ace #F-182, paperback, 1963. Cover by Frank Frazetta. First published by A. C. McClurg & Co., hardcover, March 1929. Cover by J. Allen St. John. Several other reprint editions exist.

   I was maybe 14 years old when I read a review of this book in Castle of Frankenstein magazine. I had a dollar at the time, so I got on the bus and went downtown to a place called the Paperback Gallery, a little bookstore that sold only paperbacks.

   It was there I picked up my first samples of Fu Manchu, Doc Savage, Mr Moto, Charlie Chan, the first EC reprints….. and got a copy of this. Came back home with enough left over for two chocolate bars, and had a high old time with it.

   And there it was, still on my shelf after all these years & tears & fears, just in time for Halloween.

   Reading The Monster Men in the wisdom of my advancing years, I found myself bemused by ERB’s awful prose and delighted by the pace he imparts to the story. Never mind Characterization; that don’t enter into it. It’s set on a tropical island in the South Seas, off Java and Borneo, and I wondered idly if Conrad’s Marlow might cruise by, or perhaps Somerset Maugham in search of a tale of human interest. But (SPOILER ALERT!) they didn’t.

   What does happen owes more than a nod to H.G. Wells’ Island of Dr Moreau, with an unhinged scientist, his lovely daughter and a small entourage on a tropical island where he can conduct his experiments in creating Men in relative privacy.

   Unfortunately, the mad medico’s first twelve attempts have produced only shambling monsters (hence the title of the piece) and the failures have addled him to the point where he vows to wed his daughter to Number Thirteen -– which, to everyone’s surprise, emerges from the vat looking like a Greek statue with a becoming tan.

   At which point the plot kicks into high gear, with a pirate attack, treachery within the ranks, head-hunters, a Monster rally, daring rescues, pitched battles and over it all, Number Thirteen, now known as Bulan, braving the jungle perils as one to the manner born.

   I should be ashamed to admit how much I enjoyed this. Burrough’s prose is so bad I sometimes suspect him of parody, but he keeps it moving without too much of the padding that marred the Tarzan books I tried to read back in the day. The story did eventually get to where most Burroughs books go: Everyone chasing each other around in the jungle, but in this one it seems a bit less protracted.

   Burroughs even surprised me with a bit of insight on the nature of the Soul here. He reflects a mind-set common in SF early in the 20th century, when artificial insemination was first used on animals, that a man-made creature would have no soul — an idea that surfaced in Alraune and elsewhere.

   Here, Bulan ponders his artificial origins and essential soullessness, then looks about him at the men he has encountered — pirates, thieves, and his mad creator — only to conclude that the Soul must be worth much less than the value men seem to attach to it.

   And this, oddly enough, is the kind of thing one does find in the tales of Conrad and Maugham in those same South Seas of fiction. Maybe not enough to elevate The Monster Men to the ranks of Great Literature, but it adds a bit of thoughtfulness to a ripping yarn.

PHOEBE ATWOOD TAYLOR – Death Lights a Candle. Bobbs-Merrill, hardcover, 1932. Pocket Book #204. paperback, 1943. Foul Play Press, trade paperback, 1989. Norton, trade paperback, 2005.

   The second appearance of Cape Cod’s most famous sleuth, Asey Mayo, is marked by a Wellfleet mansion being snowed in by a late March blizzard, with its owner found dead in the morning, of arsenic poisoning. Method: candles the wicks of which have been soaked in the stuff.

   Lots of suspects, no alibis, and part of the motive is half-witted at best. The detection is rudimentary, the third quarter sags badly, and you can’t keep track of the people involved without a scorecard. What this novel does have plenty of, however, is character.